I am not at CES – the Consumer Electronics Show – in Las Vegas this year, but it doesn’t seem to matter any longer whether you are physically at a major event or not – it’s now possible to follow the entire proceedings via the web and social media.  With web feeds from key magazines and newspapers, virtual press offices, Twitter, LinkedIn and FourSquare, I am constantly bombarded with newsbytes of what someone is doing or what new technology or gadget has been launched.

Utilization of the latest electronics technology for real world applications has al......

The use of RFID tracking in retail and asset tracking has been well debated for a long time now. I have long had the image of seeing all products on the shelves of supermarkets having RFID tags, and in true ‘Big Brother’ style, the supermarket will know when and which products have moved from their shelves and who has purchased them. We are not far away from that with reports of Walmart’s roll out in the USA of several billion units of passive RFID tags as well as thousands of readers.

According to forecasts announced by ABI Research this month (September 2010), the value of the ov......

The world’s largest mobile phone industry conference just took place in Barcelona, Spain, and one announcement aimed towards an introduction in India in coming months was the launch of the ‘world’s cheapest phone’ – a handset from Vodafone expected to be selling for under US$15. Judging by the discussion forums in India following this announcement, it appears to many Indians that this is just a gimmick since cheap handsets with better features have been available in India for a while.

One thing is for sure though: the underlying themes of this year’......

In the article, “The search for the next Silicon Valley”, the author Richard Wallace questions where the next Silicon Valley might appear.  Many areas in Europe have been trying to emulate the Silicon Valley experience with very few successes – for example, mainly around some of the key semiconductor companies in the south of France and Munich, Germany.  But one thing is for sure: the success of Silicon Valley in the USA did indeed occur partly due to the Asians (which includes Indians as well as those from the Far East) who had arrived to do their studies at the ma......

One of the great things to have happened in India in recent years is the mobility of workforce in and out of India.  For Indian electronics design companies, managers, and engineers, this has resulted in exposure to potential customers in the USA and Europe (the ‘West’).   However, it seems many Indian entrepreneurs in the tech sector forget some of the basics of how to win new customers – and how in the west the process is different to winning customers in India.

In recent months, I met a handful of companies in India asking a simple question: “I w......

In my various roles in the global high-tech sector, I get to talk to many successful entrepreneurs from electronics and EDA, to IT and telecoms. It’s not often that I get to talk to successful Indian entrepreneurs, but when you do, this can be very inspirational in itself.

One such occasion was last Friday evening in London, when I was given the opportunity to talk one-on-one with Mr. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys. He was in London for meetings, and as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, he was encouraged by the chairman of TiE Global, Apurv Bagri, to speak to an audience compri......

Many in the west know that India is a great place for low cost manufacturing of garments and other goods, and indeed some of the export markets continue to grow (taking into account the correction from the current world financial crisis). But the electronics manufacturing industry is one that doesn’t yet seem to have followed the path of textiles and novelty goods.

Why is this? It’s probably down to supply chain issues and infrastructure, which is also one of the key reasons for the snail’s pace growth of Indian semiconductor manufacturing.

According to Jack Chua, Siemen......

In my last piece, I referenced India’s potential to gain from outsourced engineering design services.  I have noticed another trend that is running in parallel with this. Over the last year or so, in the UK and the USA there have been several stories of India outsourcing its jobs to places in Eastern Europe and South America, including the big news last year that Tata was outsourcing 5,000 software jobs from India to Mexico.

Even more interesting have been reports that suggest Indian multi-nationals are unable to find senior managers for their operations in India and were therefore offering g......

In a global business context, India has been in the news a lot lately – particularly with Tata’s acquisition of Land Rover and Jaguar, and this week’s news that Videocon intends to pursue an acquisition of Motorola’s mobile phone business.

While news of acquisitions, tie-ups, and consolidation may be good for India Inc., will it actually mean anything for driving innovation in the electronics industry, or will the story continue to be an evolution of India’s past – of assembly-line technology?

In the early 1990s, the secretary at India’s department of electronics, Mr. N Vittal, had often st......